The joke is on your competitors

Last week, Virgin announced the launch of a “ground-breaking’’ new business—ground-breaking because it would be dedicated to journeying into the core of an active volcano. In our press release, we described plans to use patented carbon-carbon materials pioneered for deep space exploration in order to develop a revolutionary new vehicle, VVS1, capable of plunging three people into the molten lava core of an active volcano. In its first three years of operation, we explained, VVS1 would explore the five most active volcanoes in the world.

By Bloomberg

The new business would be called Virgin Volcanic, sitting alongside Virgin Galactic Llc. and Oceanic in our portfolio of exploration and adventure businesses. Like Galactic, the project would help carry out important scientific experiments, with the goal of learning to monitor and control active volcanoes. Virgin Volcanic planned to power the VVS1 probe by using heat from the molten lava, thus developing a totally renewable energy source.

I said that I planned to go on the first expedition, which would take place in 2015, and my fellow “Volcanauts” would be the rapper will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and the actor Tom Hanks. We provided detailed drawings of what VVS1 would look like. A number of film stars and celebrities had endorsed the project.

There were some clues in the press release as to the inauthenticity of this brave new venture: We dated the release 31 March but datelined it from the Republic of Vanuatu, an island with two of the most active volcanoes in the world. Vanuatu is 10 hours ahead of Britain, so our release would have been actually sent to London on 1 April.

At Virgin we take the business of fun very seriously—our designers, social media and public relations teams worked hard to pull together the Volcanic materials in a short time. To many, our elaborate Volcanic prank may seem like a waste of time and effort, as there is no immediate commercial benefit, but I have always thought that a sense of humor and the ability not to take oneself too seriously are important attributes for any company.

That joke put smiles on people’s faces and reminded them of Virgin’s sense of adventure—in many ways, it was more effective than any series of glossy ads. Our sense of humour is what makes our companies stand out in terms of customer service, and what attracts great people to work for us. We have always tried to cultivate these qualities throughout the company, partly through our pragmatic management style, where we work to empower everyone, including our frontline employees, to make good decisions rather than to just follow the company line.

Since Virgin’s early days, I have played pranks every April Fool’s Day to make people laugh, to draw attention to our brand, and also to remind employees of our company’s founding spirit. Three space-themed ones proved particularly successful, capturing people’s imaginations: In 1989 we landed a UFO near Gatwick airport (we had intended to land it in central London, but the wind blew our balloon the wrong way); in 2008 we partnered with Google Inc. to launch Virgle, with the goal of colonizing Mars; and last year we said that we had purchased Pluto following its demotion to dwarf planet status so that we could restore its classification as a planet. (We are still receiving comments from people about our acquisition of Pluto.)

These jokes have subtly highlighted Virgin’s pioneering spirit—and in fact, some in the media speculated that Virgin Galactic and Oceanic were pranks when we first announced those ventures.

This Virgin tradition may have indirectly been responsible for the creation of iTunes and the iPod, which, ironically, ended up killing our Virgin Megastores music chain. In 1986, I pulled the music industry’s leg by telling Music Week, a British music publication, that Virgin had set up a giant computer in Britain, on which we had stored every music track we could find. We were about to launch “Music Box,” a device that music lovers could use to download any track, wherever they were. The headline was “Branson’s Bombshell: The End of the Industry.”

Many music moguls, including Chris Blackwell of Island Records, called that morning to beg me not to do it. At lunchtime, I announced that the whole story was an April Fool’s joke.

Steve Jobs told me that he too had read the story. Some years later, when he had once again become chairman and chief executive officer of Apple Inc., he thought to himself, “Why not give it a go?” The moral of this story is: if you’re going to tell others—even as an April Fool’s joke—what you think the future of your industry might look like, you had better be sure that your company has a plan already in place, or the joke will be on you.